What is our preferred approach for structuring log output?

[jaredlt]

The Rails defaults for log structure / formatting leave a lot to be desired.

• Multi-line logs for a single request make them hard to search (if you grep for FATAL there is nothing else on that line, you then have to search the logs around it)
• Querying across the data is hard eg. how many POST requests to the OrdersController have a status of 500? Even querying on data that exists on a single line can require some regex-foo which takes a bunch of time

These issues are magnified on production when using a unified logging tool and trying to debug an issue.

[jaredlt]

Lograge feels like it's the most well known and "reached for" option

https://github.com/roidrage/lograge

(the README has a nice write up of the problems with Rails defaults)

My only hesitancy is that the last commit was 2 years ago and an issue opened about the project status in 2021 went unanswered.

We are using lograge successfully for production config with clients (Rails 7.2)

[nickcharlton]

I've long used lograge. I can't imagine there's going to be much upstream (i.e. Rails) change to logging, so I'm not too worried about it not having anything merged in or released in a long time.

[jaredlt]

Rails Semantic Logger seems to be the other big player and is actively maintained

https://github.com/reidmorrison/rails_semantic_logger

I've not used it but the docs look nice and the output looks similar to lograge.